You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (38 page)

Meanwhile, the 2005 NFL season would be a lame-duck year on ABC. Even though I knew I could stay with the new
Monday Night
package in 2006, my contract was expiring and I obviously was interested in going with John to NBC when the season concluded. And it appeared I’d have until the end of 2005 to make a choice. Dick Ebersol had already been in contact with my agent and wanted me to come over. But the initial offer was one I couldn’t accept. I was being asked to take a significant cut in salary and I knew that, in addition, I would almost certainly have to give up the NBA, which I was really growing to love. Then, all of a sudden, while on vacation in Hawaii in July, ESPN told me they wanted an answer immediately. They’d clearly gotten the word that NBC was talking with me. I had less than forty-eight hours to make my decision. The NBC offer wasn’t palatable. So, after three gulps of Pepto-Bismol, I called George Bodenheimer to say I was staying. It was announced the next day.

Sure enough, 2005 was an awkward year. John was going to NBC, Fred and Drew were in career limbo, and I was rolling around in bed every night trying to figure out the rest of my career. The last few years had been too much fun and now I was going off to some “foreign” operation without my buddies, who just happened to be the best in the business. In October, Bodenheimer came to a
Monday Night
game in Indianapolis. An hour before kickoff, we walked onto the field together. I told George that I was hearing from my sources in the league office that beginning next season
Monday Night on ESPN
wasn’t going to get the same schedule of premier games that the ABC version had gotten. George said no—Mark Shapiro had assured him the schedule would still be the same. I had better information, and I told George the litmus test would be when the schedule came out the following spring. In all my years doing
Monday Night Football
except one or two, the reigning Super Bowl champion had appeared the maximum number of times on Monday night—three. If that was the case again, then that would be the sign the schedule was of the same quality. But if the champion played just twice, or conceivably only once, that would be a sign that Monday night’s reign as the NFL’s premier game was a thing of the past. I told George I was hearing there would be not three, not even two, but
one
appearance only. And that
Sunday Night Football
on NBC would feature the champions three times. And could “flex” them in even more.

The schedule for 2006 would come out that next April. Sure enough, the Super Bowl champion Steelers would appear only once on the
Monday Night
schedule. Week two. At Jacksonville.

I wouldn’t be there.

LATE IN THAT LAME
duck 2005 season, Dick Ebersol visited a
Monday Night Football
game in Baltimore, and watched Fred and Drew produce and direct part of the game in the production truck. He later compared it to “watching the frickin’ ballet.” Minutes after the game, Dick signed Fred—who was being cast aside by ESPN—to produce
Sunday Night Football
the following season. Ebersol had already signed Drew to direct the new
Sunday Night
. So now I was the last of the Mohicans. Meanwhile, Ebersol still hadn’t chosen a new play-by-play announcer for the package.

Finally, at the end of December, I had to at least explore the possibility of getting out of my ESPN deal. In my mind, it just wasn’t going to work. I was learning too much about their “new” approach to
Monday Night Football
and I was going to be the wrong guy in the wrong place. I knew Madden, Gaudelli, and Esocoff were politicking Ebersol to get me over with them. I wanted to go there in the first place but couldn’t accept the offer. Word began to get out that I was looking to jump to NBC. I knew it would look like I was trying to “break” my contract. One columnist to whom the information was leaked wrote exactly that. I wanted to say, “Hey, pal, nobody
breaks
a contract to take a forty percent pay cut!” But I had to stay quiet. I just knew it had to get done.

Quickly, agents and more executives got involved. This was going to happen. Disney got some concessions from NBC for releasing me from my deal—including rights to broadcast additional Ryder Cup programming and to extended highlight packages from other NBC properties, including the Olympics. Right after the Super Bowl, in which the Steelers beat the Seahawks in Detroit, 21–10, the deal was 99 percent done. But it had already been a headache for ABC’s and ESPN’s public relations departments. For several weeks they’d had to deal with the lame-duck statuses of John, Fred, and Drew, plus rumors of my possible departure. At one point in Detroit during Super Bowl week, I personally apologized to the PR people for the distraction. Then, though, a wacky plan was hatched to make their jobs easier when the deal was announced.

In the 1920s, before he’d created Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney’s original cartoon creation at Universal Studios was a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. But Walt Disney hadn’t been able to hold on to the rights when he left the studio—and all these years later, Universal (NBC’s corporate sibling) still owned Oswald, even though no one had any idea who Oswald was. Some Disney heirs had asked Bob Iger for years to try to bring Oswald “back home.” This was hardly a high-priority issue for Bob. Then someone came up with the idea that if we included Oswald in
this
deal, the press would lock in on that aspect of the story and it would overshadow any suspicions of nefariousness. And that’s exactly what happened. Even though the deal had already been done pre-Oswald, still, to this day, I’ll occasionally see or hear a story that says I was traded for a cartoon rabbit—normally written or told by someone who should be traded in a two-for-one deal for Dopey and Goofy.

There was a much bigger story, though. Within a year,
Sunday Night Football,
with the old
Monday Night
’s producer, director, announcers, and about forty of the best technicians and production men and women in the country, would be one of the top few shows on television—with the best games and matchups and 50 percent more viewers than ESPN’s “new”
Monday Night Football.
It might not be an over-the-top exaggeration to say that this deal saved NBC. That sentiment was echoed throughout the network.

THE FIRST THREE SEASONS
of
Sunday Night Football
were an extension of those wonderful last four years of the
Monday Night Football
we’d been a part of at ABC. Then, when John Madden retired after that epic Steelers-Cardinals Super Bowl, Cris Collinsworth was waiting in the wings. As I’ve said many times, I felt like I went from Joe DiMaggio to Mickey Mantle.

I first crossed paths with Cris when I covered three or four of his University of Florida games. In 1988, when I was calling the baseball All-Star Game in Cincinnati, and he was nearing the end of his NFL career with the Bengals, he’d stopped by the booth before the game to ask if we could announce on national television that he’d be getting engaged to the beauteous Holly Bankemper before the night was done. We couldn’t. But I loved his chutzpah. In 2006, Dick Ebersol had brought him over from Fox to work the
Sunday Night
pregame show along with Bob Costas, making him the obvious candidate to replace John Madden when he retired. It was the perfect choice.

It isn’t just that Cris has superb insights and it’s not just that he sees every aspect of the game—and I mean
every
part of the game. As with all the top-of-the-pyramid analysts, he knows how to communicate and connect with the viewer. You turn off the vast majority of the audience when you get too technical. Walk down the street and ask 100 people to define a “three-technique tackle,” and 99 of them would look back at you like zombies. Cris has mastered the art of taking complex points and explaining them so lucidly that
everyone
can understand.

One great example of Cris’s uncanny prophetic ability came at the end of a game in October 2012. The Chargers were playing the Saints in New Orleans, and the Saints were up by a touchdown in the final minute. San Diego had the ball, and on second and ten, Philip Rivers threw an incomplete pass. And then Cris explained there was more to the story. During the replay, Cris pointed out that the Chargers’ left tackle, Jared Gaither, had been beaten by Saints defensive end Martez Wilson, which led Rivers to have to release the ball early to avoid a sack. Cris went on to say that Gaither looked hurt, and warned that if the Chargers didn’t adjust, Wilson was going to have a sack to end the game. Well—what happened on third down? Wilson beat Gaither, sacked Rivers, stripped the ball, and recovered it. Game over. As perfectly and succinctly predicted by Cris Collinsworth.

Cris also has always been very candid, unafraid to say things that might not sit well with the people he’s talking about—players, coaches, even owners—but that are true. And he does it all without making a show of himself. Cris is not one of those “experts” who figuratively jump up and down and scream to the world, “Listen to me! Look at me!” He just tells it as it is.

When we started together in 2009, it was seamless—exactly like working with John Madden or Doc Rivers. And then, apart from being a sensational partner, Cris also became a great friend. A couple of years ago, he arranged something that was going to put me, in a manner of speaking, over the moon. He arranged for me to meet the one human being who topped my list of “the one person you’d never met whom you’d most like to have dinner with.”

At one time or another, I’ve covered almost every sports star of the last four decades. I’ve gotten to know many of them well. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet presidents, inventors, renowned authors, and a veritable “Who’s Who in America” (and elsewhere). But the one man I always wanted to break bread with was Neil Armstrong. I’m not entirely sure where it came from—it’s not like I was ever an astronomy buff. But as a child, at least as a child in my generation, flying to the moon was the be-all and end-all. And then, in 1969, it happened!

Not to diminish winning a Nobel Prize or batting title or Super Bowl or Oscar. But, come on! Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the moon. Trump that.

Well, in 2011, at dinner one night, Cris Collinsworth finds out about my fascination with Neil Armstrong. “If I could have dinner with one person,” I tell him, “it would be Armstrong.”

As it turned out, Cris—a prominent figure in Cincinnati, which was where Neil Armstrong lived—knew Neil and had played several rounds of golf with him. It also turned out that—no surprise, really—Neil loved sports. And Cris arranged that a couple of nights before the Steelers at Bengals game in October 2012, we would be having dinner with Neil Armstrong! If there was a game on our schedule I couldn’t wait for,
this
was the one.

In August—two months before that game—Collinsworth and I were in New York preparing to do a preseason game. As we drove back from the Jets’ practice facility, the radio was on. And we hear the report:
Neil Armstrong has died of complications from coronary artery bypass surgery
.

R.I.P. forever, Mr. Armstrong.

FOR YEARS, THE FOOTBALL
season would start with articles predicting the impending doom of
Monday Night Football.
It’s now only been around for forty-five seasons. I spent twenty of those in the booth and they went by in about twenty minutes. And now it’s Season Nine of NBC’s
Sunday Night Football
and they’ve gone by just as rapidly. For the last two years, it’s been the highest-rated show in all of television. All of us on the package know that the games, the matchups, and the superstars are the central part of the show’s appeal. But there are more than a hundred people who devote a major portion of their lives working to make
Sunday Night
the very best presentation of a football game ever.

It starts with Fred Gaudelli and Drew Esocoff and the standards they set. But their passion and drive envelop everyone on the broadcast. There are a lot of people who make Cris and me look better every week—“Malibu” Kelly Hayes, my longtime spotter, who once lived in Malibu but moved to Aspen many moons ago; George Hill, my statistics maven with the wit of a genius—some of the best lines attributed to me have actually come from notes passed by George; Ken Hirdt, son of Steve, our head of research; Melissa Horton, our stage manager (“kennel keeper,” I like to say), who keeps everything flowing seamlessly; Audrey Mansfield (could there be a better name for a makeup artist?); Andy Freeland, who came to the party when Cris came aboard and could wind up some day as the all-time
Jeopardy
champion. And downstairs and around the stadium, Fred has put together the best of the best. Cameramen and women, tape operators, production assistants—you name it—it’s an all-star team. And a character by the name of Vinny Rao, whose job description is “whatever.” Every company in America should have a Vinny Rao. You need something—
anything—
to get done, Vinny somehow gets it done. Always. And never takes any credit for it.

A fairly sizable number of viewers and even a few sports television executives tend to minimize and even denigrate the importance and value of the sideline reporter. I strongly disagree with that assessment. I’ve worked with the very best—Lesley Visser practically invented the genre and is one of the great characters of all time, with a boundless sense of humor. Andrea Kremer was with us for the first five years of the NBC
Sunday Night
package and her work on HBO’s
Real Sports
is simply spectacular. I’ll put them up against any sports reporters in the country, print or electronic. On the air, they ask smart, concise questions that often trigger thoughtful responses. They’re not afraid to broach tough topics. And their value extends off the air, as well. Because of their proximity to the field and the sidelines, they can see things that we, from the booth, can’t. We can talk to them during commercial breaks or they can communicate with the production truck. And they’re like the postmen—neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night (nor fans screaming at them from the stands) can keep them from their appointed rounds.